


[Fandom stats] Crossovers, fusions, and crossover pairings on AO3

by toastystats (destinationtoast)



Series: Fandom Stats [102]
Category: Fandom - Fandom
Genre: Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:28:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28300878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/destinationtoast/pseuds/toastystats
Summary: A statistical look at patterns in AO3 crossovers, fusions, crossover pairings, and more.
Series: Fandom Stats [102]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/60910
Comments: 7
Kudos: 68
Collections: Fandom Trumps Hate 2020





	[Fandom stats] Crossovers, fusions, and crossover pairings on AO3

**Author's Note:**

  * For [EmergentOmens (Janus13)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Janus13/gifts).



> I auctioned off some fandom stats for this year's Fandom Trumps Hate charity drive. I'm delighted that EmergentOmens won and gave me wonderful prompts concerning crossovers! And I'm grateful for their patience waiting for the results... It has sure been A Year.
> 
> You can also view the images here in [Google Slides](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/15-teiAHAWghgNYQUNlMkpKg1BfpGqtDME0tbsZ5VrE4/edit?usp=sharing), if you prefer (but the explanations here are more thorough).

[](https://photos.app.goo.gl/xYRtCfGfbPEvMpS89)

I'm so excited to be doing stats on fandom crossovers and fusions on AO3! They're a bit complicated to do stats on, but it's been incredibly fun and interesting to look through the results. The reason it can be complex is that people have such varied tagging practices on AO3 -- this is one of the few cases where Fanfiction.Net probably makes fandom stats easier than AO3 does (and doing some stats on FFN crossovers sounds like a fun future project). For instance, say that I’m writing a Tony Stark/Bruce Wayne crossover fic that’s a Pride & Prejudice fusion. Here are a bunch of different ways I could signal that on AO3 (not all are equally useful, but these are all kinds of things I see people do): 

  * List all of the following in the fandom tags: “Batman (Nolan movies),” “Iron Man (Movies),” and “Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen” 
  * List “DCU” and “Marvel” in the fandom tags, and also use one of the subtags of “Crossovers and Fandom Fusions,” like “Alternate Universe - Pride and Prejudice Setting” -- or “Alternate Universe - Jane Austen Fusion” 
  * Just list “DCU” in the fandom tags if Tony Stark is the only Marvel transplant, and use the additional tag “Pride and Prejudice References” (not a subtag of “Crossovers and Fandom Fusions”) 
  * Just type something like “superheroes” in the fandom tag, and “Tony Stark/Bruce Wayne” as the relationship. Mention Pride & Prejudice in the summary. 



...and so on. Also note that tagging something with multiple fandoms is ambiguous -- I could do so because I’m posting a bunch of ficlets from different fandoms as separate chapters of the same fanwork. So it’s no guarantee that it’s a crossover or fusion if multiple fandoms are tagged. 

Nonetheless, there's plenty to learn about crossovers and fusions by looking at patterns in AO3 tags. Just keep in mind, even more than usual, that we’re in large part be learning about how AO3 tags are used and organized -- not purely about how many crossovers or fusions there are. 

**Because these analyses involve multiple fandoms and multiple kinds of tagging, they're a bit more complicated than many of mine. And I'm not sure I explained it all clearly. Please feel free to ask questions or let me know if you find any of this confusing!**

A final note: crossovers generally involve combining characters from different stories, while fusions involve merging one story's characters with another's universe. Most of my analyses aren't actually going to separate those two categories, though, because it's often hard to tell whether something is a crossover or fusion without reading the actual fanwork. I'll therefore loosely talk about crossovers and fusions as one group, for the most part. An exception is crossover pairings, where we can definitely see that characters are crossing over and combining. 

Many of the tags on AO3 that are used to signal crossovers/fusions were wrangled together by AO3 Tag Wranglers under "[Crossovers & Fandom Fusions](https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Crossovers%20*a*%20Fandom%20Fusions)." So I started out looking at the most popular subtags: 

[](https://photos.app.goo.gl/R6we5HJDfWeeg25B8)

This is the top 25 -- here is a [longer list.](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sRe_7PJh6YbiOamXqOPxdYMVIGix5N146PU6m4C0cNA/edit#gid=972963482)

For each of these tags, I've listed the three fandoms that most commonly use them in gray. So, for instance, the Harry Potter Setting tag is most often used by the BTS, Haikyuu!!, and Sherlock fandoms. Also note that almost all of these tags actually start out with "Alternate Universe - " but I omitted that for length. 

A few notes: 

  * “Grand Theft Auto Setting” appears to be mostly used in fandoms of vloggers who canonically cover these games or roleplay characters in these games (AFAIK), so I’m not sure it’s a fusion in the canonical sense. 
  * “Fusion of Star Wars Legends and Disney Canon” is another apparent non-traditional fusion tag; it appears to be Star Wars fanworks that treat as canon some Star Wars novels (etc.) that were at some point de-canonicalized by the official Star Wars creators. 
  * Multiple variants that are semantically related are not wrangled together, like “Alternate Universe - Pride and Prejudice Setting” vs. “Alternate Universe - Jane Austen Fusion” (but OTOH, “Disney Fusion” is a superset of “Tangled (2010) Fusion” and others). So different authors might choose to use different ones, or both. 
  * Many fusions don’t use any of these tags. They may just tag both fandoms -- e.g., they may use both the “DCU” and the “Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling” fandom tag to signify that it’s a fic about Batman going to Hogwarts. Or they may just explain in the summary that the fic takes place at Hogwarts and not use any Harry Potter-related tags at all. 



But wait... where are some common fusions like daemons (His Dark Materials)? There are a bunch of tags that are commonly used on crossovers or fusions that are notably missing from this list, as they are not classified as subtags of "Crossovers & Fandom Fusions" (possibly due to historical quirks of wrangling, or possibly because there are ambiguities of how they are used): 

  * "Alternate Universe - Mythology" (6017 works) -- I'm only listing this one because it seems very similar to the "Alternate Universe - Greek Religion & Lore Fusion" tag, shown above 
  * "Alternate Universe - Daemons" (2614 works) -- Mostly used to signal a His Dark Materials fusion. (There is also a substantially less common tag that is a subtag of Crossovers & Fandom Fusions" but wasn't popular enough to make it onto the above chart: "Alternate Universe - His Dark Materials Fusion.") 
  * "Alternate Universe - Avatar & Benders Setting" (1255 works) -- Avatar fusions 
  * "Alternate Universe - Mutants" (1101 works) -- Lots of X-Men fusions here 
  * "Alternate Universe - Supernatural Hunters" (634 works) -- Supernatural fusions 
  * "Alternate Universe - Vampire Slayer" (599 works) -- BtVS fusions 



We'll return to the missing "Alternate Universe - Daemons" tag shortly. But first, let's look at some fandoms that have a particularly high usage of "Crossovers & Fandom Fusions" or its subtags.

[](https://photos.app.goo.gl/pn1H5A64Bxiu427m6)

In each of these cases, the purple bar shows the percentage of fanworks in the fandom that are tagged with "Crossovers & Fandom Fusions" (or a subtag). Meanwhile, the pink bar shows the fandom that each fandom most commonly crosses over with -- and the gray text to the right of the bar names that fandom. So, for instance, in AO3 fanworks that list "The Sandman (Comics)" as a fandom, 28% of those works use the tag "Crossovers & Fandom Fusions" or one of its subtags. And 6% of those fanworks list Harry Potter as another fandom (more than any other fandom). So Sandman and Harry Potter appear to have a lot of crossovers (even if some of those works aren't actually crossovers but are collections of ficlets -- probably a lot of them are actually crossovers or fusions). 

It's interesting to see that some of these fandoms (Brave, Tangled, Broadchurch) are more likely to tag another fandom than they are to us a crossover or fusion tag. 

Note that the fandoms shown here are not necessarily huge -- there are 997 Sandman works, meaning it would still barely qualify as a small fandom for Yuletide -- but they do have a very large percentage of crossovers. 

There is a [longer list](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sRe_7PJh6YbiOamXqOPxdYMVIGix5N146PU6m4C0cNA/edit#gid=1407704300) available. (Note: with this and many of the analyses, I initially gathered data back in March. I later updated some of the data in December... but only for the top fandoms. So if you click through to the spreadsheet and scroll down far enough, you'll eventually find rows that only contain data from March 2020.) 

[](https://photos.app.goo.gl/yLksF4wH8nXYWbbm8)

Let's return to His Dark Materials, aka the daemon universe. Since that is a huge source of fusions that was missing from the previous analyses due to a quirk of tag wrangling, I have done a separate analysis. Here are the top 20 fandoms most likely to crossover/fuse with HDM. And [here is a longer list](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bgBHXEd5rzmVQ5X_cIDR2Y_iJkIC7cZFgea8Jk6SYg0/edit#gid=1721649669) \-- though note that some fandoms are probably missing from this list. Also note that it’s possible that not every use of “Alternate Universe - Daemons” is an HDM fusion, though the ones I looked at all seemed to be. 

There are two main ways that people tag HDM fusions. One is by using the "Alternate Universe - Daemons" tag, and the other is by adding "His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman" to the list of fandoms. I also looked at the tags "His Dark Materials (TV)" and "Alternate Universe - His Dark Materials Fusion," but neither gets used nearly as often, so I omitted them here. 

Some of the fandoms here that are not in the overall top fandoms, including Mad Max, are driven primarily by a single series/author. 

In 2014, I took a similar look at the [fandoms that most often crossover with Harry Potter](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16926648), and the different ways they were tagged. 

[](https://photos.app.goo.gl/viycRCVZrYiaUNeBA)

These are the pairs of crossover fandoms I could find with more than 500 crossover fanworks -- with a few exclusions below. (Caveat -- these are fanworks where both of the fandom tags are used; no crossover- or fusion-related tags are necessarily used. So some of these are undoubtedly collections of ficlets from different fandoms and other non-crossovers. But still, all of these pairs of fandoms probably crossover quite a bit.) [Here is the longer list](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sRe_7PJh6YbiOamXqOPxdYMVIGix5N146PU6m4C0cNA/edit#gid=1551357815). 

This includes crossovers where at least one of the properties is either primarily live action or has a live action adaptation (e.g., Harry Potter has live action movies as well as books, so Harry Potter is eligible. And this means Harry Potter x Naruto gets included even though Naruto is not live action). Animation crossovers are shown separately on the following slide. Other things that are NOT included on this list: 

  * Video games-only (e.g., Legend of Zelda + Super Mario) 
  * Marvel-only (e.g., Captain America + Thor) 
  * DCU-only (e.g., Arrow + The Flash) 
  * Musician RPF-only (e.g., Fall Out Boy + MCR, or BTS + GOT7) 
  * Pairs of fandoms that are in the same series (sequels or spinoffs) 
  * Pairs of fandoms where one is an adaptation of another 



There were a lot of potential crossovers of some of those omitted types. I can try to cover some of these in separate analyses if there’s enough interest. But all of them were very confusing for me to try to analyze because there are a whole lot of canon crossovers and spinoffs (at least for the comics and the video games), and I'm not familiar enough to be able to know which ones are which. E.g., I don’t know how to decide whether something like Batman (Comics) + Red Hood and the Outlaws (Comics) should count as a crossover or not. Or The Avengers + Thor, for that matter. And should it count separately if it’s Thor (Comics) crossing over with the Avengers movies vs. Thor (Movies)? And I’m also not familiar with any of the musicians/bands/K-pop groups with big fandoms. All of which is to say -- I would probably need a bunch of help crowdsourcing those analyses to understand what’s interesting and worth including. But please speak up if there are analyses you’d really like to see, especially if you're interested in helping me categorize canon crossovers and spinoffs and so forth.

[](https://photos.app.goo.gl/m41kDHfmS71PDkCz7)

Here is the breakdown for pairs of animation fandoms with > 200 crossover fanworks. And [here's the longer list.](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sRe_7PJh6YbiOamXqOPxdYMVIGix5N146PU6m4C0cNA/edit#gid=355871254)

A lot of this list is dominated by crossovers between four animated properties that people seem to enjoy combining: Rise of the Guardians, How to Train Your Dragon, Brave, and Tangled. There are a lot of works that combine all/most of these in a single fanwork, and these are often referred to as The Big Four or [Rise of the Brave Tangled Dragons](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Rise_of_the_Brave_Tangled_Dragons). Frozen also often makes it into this mix. You'll see combos of these characters and fandoms in the following analyses, too, because this mega-crossover is huge! 

[](https://photos.app.goo.gl/hWWPVusUiCXcrJMq6)

These are all the crossover pairings I could identify with > 100 fanworks. This analysis is more likely than most to be missing some items; it's especially hard to track down these kinds of pairings. Here's [a longer list](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sRe_7PJh6YbiOamXqOPxdYMVIGix5N146PU6m4C0cNA/edit#gid=1571452614) of pairings I found. 

In gray, I've listed the pairs of fandoms the characters are from. But note that there are at least two characters that are not directly from canon: [Matt the Radar Technician](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Matt_the_Radar_Technician) is a Kylo Ren alias from an SNL sketch. And [Elyza Lex](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Elyza_Lex) is a purely fanon character devised by Clexa shippers after Lexa in The 100 died and the actress who played her went on to Fear the Walking Dead. Elyza Lex is an imagined character on Fear the Walking Dead, but is often portrayed as a reincarnation of Clarke on The 100 (if I understand correctly), so I've tagged it as a crossover pairing. 

[](https://photos.app.goo.gl/an9iSHom3pDWvQqV9)

These are pairs of fandoms that crossover a lot -- at least 20% of one of the fandoms is a crossover with the other fandom, and there are at least 100 crossover fanworks total. Most of them are quirky combos that might be unexpected to anyone outside of fandom, so I've roughly called this set "fanon-dependent." They often share some underlying common headcanon or some kind of meta overlap. Some of them involve crossover ships where the characters are played by actors from a popular ship (e.g., shipping Hannigram or Fili/Kili actors in other roles). Some of them involve shipping the same actor in different roles (e.g., Gillian Anderson in The Fall and X-Files), or fusing multiple universes/characters that feature the same actor. And there are (once again) a few combinations of animated universes and/or characters that fans just seem to feel belong together. In gray, I've listed AO3 tags that are frequently used in the crossovers and help to explain them.

Here's a [longer list](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sRe_7PJh6YbiOamXqOPxdYMVIGix5N146PU6m4C0cNA/edit#gid=1688426767), which includes some of my other favorite fan headcanons, like "Q is a Holmes" (Sherlock + James Bond). The gray text is also easier to read in the spreadsheet! 

[](https://photos.app.goo.gl/7D2yXXq3jfCKpR9eA)

I was interested also in what differences we might see between crossovers with books and crossovers with adaptations of the same books. As one case study, I looked at Good Omens. Unlike a fandom like Harry Potter, with Good Omens it's easy to look at fanworks that are tagged only with the book fandom or only with the TV fandom. (I excluded works that were tagged with both book and TV for this analysis -- which is a huge number of fanworks.) 

There were a number of the same fandoms that crossed over with both the book and TV fanworks. Some of them, like Supernatural and Lucifer, involve overlapping themes or characters with Good Omens. But it was interesting to see Supernatural crossing over so much more with the book than with the TV show. Others on the list are huge fandoms that crossover a lot with everything (like Sherlock). And some of the differences in the list of top fandoms are probably due to the fact that the book was popular earlier than the TV show -- e.g., Buffy the Vampire Slayer had its peak fandom activity a while ago, and overlaps more with the book than the TV show. 

One of the interesting patterns I saw here, though -- books/comics written by the same authors as the book were much more likely to cross over with the book. Fandoms featuring one of the two main actors from the TV show were far more likely to crossover with the TV show. The fandoms that follow these patterns are shown in bold. (Though note that Doctor Who and Harry Potter are also two of the biggest fandoms overall, and also cross over a lot with the book... it’s unclear how much of a difference it makes that David Tennant plays roles in both.) Some of the apparent crossovers between shows/films featuring the same actors are actually RPF, but that's a relatively small subset. 

Sidenote: I also took a look at works that were tagged with both Good Omens book and TV fandoms, and I tried to see if I could detect any common tagging patterns that indicated a crossover between the Good Omens book and TV characters. (And/or crossovers with other adaptations, such as the radio version of Good Omens.) E.g., fics where parallel universes got mixed up and book/TV/radio versions of Crowley all traded places. It turns out tagging is really messy when it comes to this kind of metafiction. Here are a few of the many tags that sometimes got used on such fanworks, falling into two categories: 

  1. Strong indicators of crossovers between Good Omens versions, but extremely rare (and often not organized yet by the AO3 Tag Wranglers): 
    * Book & Radio & TV Crossover 
    * Book/Radio/TV Crossover 
    * Book Aziraphale and Crowley 
    * TV Aziraphale and Crowley 
    * Radio Aziraphale and Crowley 
    * 1992 Movie Script Aziraphale (Good Omens) 
    * 1992 Movie Script Crowley (Good Omens) 
  2. Often used on such crossovers, but also often used on non-crossover fanworks -- so weak indicators: 
    * Canon - Good Omens (Book & TV Combination) 
    * Parallel Universes 
    * Metafiction 
    * Crack Treated Seriously 



[](https://photos.app.goo.gl/2fj8ZHvtyTgT85U77)

On a fun note -- some fandoms mostly exist on AO3 as crossovers with other fandoms. Untitled Goose Game is one such fandom; over 80% of its fanworks are crossovers! The goose appears in just over 320 fanworks, but has wandered through a diverse set of fandoms, big and small. These are all the fandoms with at least 3 crossover fanworks with the Untitled Goose Game. But even Good Omens -- the most common crossover -- only has 16 fanworks also tagged with the goose fandom. 

I don't have a firm theory of what makes for a good crossover-with-everything fandom, like Untitled Goose Game. But I'd be curious to hear your theories -- and/or any other such fandoms you've run across! 

To wrap up, I looked at how the amount of tagging of "Crossovers & Fandom Fusions" has changed over time: 

[](https://photos.app.goo.gl/rXdtprdXGgGjvMHS6)

My main takeaway: Holy crap, fandom is producing thousands of new crossover/fusion works every month! This is awesome -- and 2020 has led to a huge surge in production of these fanworks along with so many other kinds (see my [AO3 in 2020](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27315784) analysis for more detail). 

The percentage of AO3 fanworks tagged with "Crossovers & Fandom Fusions" or one of its subtags has decreased a bit since 2012 (I started the analysis there because before that, there were few enough works on the archive that the percentage was quite volatile). However, as we've seen, tagging practices for crossovers and fusions are so varied that this doesn't necessarily mean the number of crossovers has decreased; the way people tag/describe their crossovers may just have just gotten more diverse. And regardless, this percentage is still big enough to make crossovers & fusions one of the most popular kinds of fanworks to create. Which is exciting for everyone who loves seeing their favorite characters and universes combined! :) 

This set of analyses was really fun to do. I also am hoping to eventually look at how canon crossover events affect fandom, but that's going to take a lot more analysis, so I'm sharing this as is for now and may add more later. I'm looking forward to hearing everyone's follow-up thoughts and questions! :) 

Finally, a ton of Tumblr users gave me [comments and theories about various crossovers](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1z8AuA8kz0nbTYMENm57yiRMIfsRIQ-Sbeho6n7W3_LI/edit?usp=sharing). I didn't get a chance to use all of that info directly here, but it influenced my analyses and writeup, and it made for a very interesting read! I've collected together all their comments in a [separate doc](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1z8AuA8kz0nbTYMENm57yiRMIfsRIQ-Sbeho6n7W3_LI/edit?usp=sharing) for anyone else who wants to read it.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed this, EmergentOmens -- thank you again for the lovely prompt and helping out a worthy charity! <3 -- and that everyone else who read through to the end also enjoyed! 
> 
> Thanks to a large number of readers of my Tumblr who helped me figure out why various fandoms might be crossing over and answer other questions, including [everyone listed in this doc!](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1z8AuA8kz0nbTYMENm57yiRMIfsRIQ-Sbeho6n7W3_LI/edit?usp=sharing) You all made this work much easier and more fun. :)


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